Securing the American Character

Our country has always been driven by big ideas. We were founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” — a revolutionary concept in the 18th century. Social movements like the drive for civil rights propelled us closer to the ideals that our Founders espoused. The GI Bill empowered our returning veterans to lead the country as they came home from World War II. Each of these big ideas responded to crises of the time — taxation without representation; the hypocrisy of separate but equal; 16 million veterans demobilizing from war. Right now, we are facing a new crisis: Citizenship no longer demands a common experience — and so we no longer believe in a common future. The time has come for a dramatic and bold response that calls on every young American to serve.

Today, the need for a shared experience of citizenship is more poignant than ever. We are drifting apart. Traditional forms of civic participation have atrophied. Our politics lurch from one bitter breakdown to the next while massive issues that affect our national prosperity and security languish unaddressed. We are losing our concept of citizenship. The sense of responsibility and contribution that President John F. Kennedy trumpeted and the willingness to sacrifice for an idea that Abraham Lincoln immortalized in 272 words at Gettysburg feel like faint echoes from earlier, nobler times.

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National service is the big idea for our time. All young Americans should have the opportunity and feel the responsibility to serve their country. We need to create a culture in which at least a year of service is culturally expected, if not quite mandatory by law.

What would the concept of a “service year” entail? A young person would perform a year of full-time service between the ages of 18 and 28 and receive a modest stipend. As with existing programs such as AmeriCorps, he or she would complete the service year at a host institution: a nonprofit, a university or other institution. The service could be done across a wide array of fields from education to conservation, and it could entail tasks like building homes, serving meals to the elderly or helping veterans transition back to civilian life. This would not be a big new government program. Rather, service years would be funded through public-private partnerships enabled by a national service technology platform that would connect young people who want to serve, orga­nizations that can host them and funders. There wouldn’t be a single top-down program. Rather, everyone would be connected by the common experience of their service year.

A service year would go beyond helping to solve social problems. By creating a cultural expectation that every young person does a year of challenging, meaningful service to the nation — whose goals are big and where success means solving complex, dynamic problems — more young Americans are likely to have an experience that reinforces and instills values like grit and persistence. These are the very skills that have been found to predict career success and that employers are seeking. More important than the skills a service year would impart on those serving, and more urgent than the specific social problems that service years could help to solve, a system of national service is needed to mend what is an increasingly shorn society.

Many similar ideas have been proposed before, but this idea is now more achievable than it’s ever been. Despite dwindling social trust, young people are in fact more likely than their predecessors to try to serve in some way. A 2010 Pew survey found that 57 percent of millennials report having volunteered in the preceding six months. Thirty percent of millennials identify meaningful work as the single most important factor in a successful career, while 71 percent identify meaningful work as one of the top three most important factors. In addition, the demand for service dramatically exceeds the supply of existing service opportunities. AmeriCorps had more than 580,000 applications for just over 80,000 slots in 2011 . In the same year, Teach for America had some 48,000 applications for just 5,200 slots. Unfortunately, there’s no common pathway large enough to match such enthusiasm.

According to Pew, “relatively few millennials — just 2% of males — are military veterans. At a comparable stage of their life cycle, 6% of gen X-er men, 13% of baby boomer men and 24% of silent men were veterans.”

It would be easy to look at those numbers and say that young people simply don’t want to join the military or serve, but that’s not the case. The military is smaller than it was and the requirements for military duty disqualify many people who would still like to serve. Rather than expanding the military simply to provide more service slots, the country should work to create a new civic institution — the service year — that’s reflective of young people’s enthusiasms and functions to give everyone a stake in the outcome of the country by giving them the opportunity to serve.

To endure in the long run, national service and the service year must be something that young people want to do. Conscription movements fail and become counterproductive when they become something that wealthier young people can avoid.

My organization, the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute, is working to connect service year positions to existing civic institutions like schools, nonprofits, faith-based organizations and businesses. The underlying purpose of national service must be to mold better citizens and bind our young people to one another and to the nation. The only way we can transform these ideas into reality is if we get a broad swath of Americans to agree with the fundamental idea that “everyone should serve for a year.” As a first step, we are bringing together 300 outstanding individuals for a summit in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday through Friday who will make commitments and take action to turn this vision into a reality.

Young people want to serve, and our country badly needs it. There’s a chance — right now — to create a new rite of passage into adulthood and forge a renewed sense of citizenship. All young Americans should have the opportunity to serve.

Retired general Stanley McChrystal is chair of the Leadership Council of the Aspen Institute’s Franklin Project, which promotes national service among American youth. This piece is a shortened version of a longer article by General McChrystal in this month’s issue of Democracy Journal.